SIERRA VISTA - Healthy rainfall has cooled the earth and turned everything green. Six-legged creatures abound.

"And where there's a lot of insects, there's a lot of birds," said Hank Brodkin, president of the Southwest Wings Birding Festival, which got under way Wednesday.

Brodkin

By late afternoon, 180 registrants from places as far away as Brooklyn, N.Y., Maine and Toronto had arrived at the Windemere Hotel. "There will be other people just kind of dropping in," Brodkin said, noting there are at least four million birders in the United States, making the activity more popular than golf, fishing and hunting. "Most of the field trips are full," Brodkin said. "But there are a lot of seminars, and most of those are no charge."

However, he pointed out that drop-in attendees would still have to pay a $15 registration fee, although families with children would be exempt from that.

Vendors and agencies were busy setting up their booths. They included various artisans, Tucson Audubon Society, Friends of the San Pedro River, Bureau of Land Management and others.

Jeff Bouton, a manufacturer representative with Leica Sport Optics, was on hand to explain digiscoping - "one of the crazes of the birding community," he said. Digiscoping technology lets a person to use an ordinary point-and-shoot digital camera to take photographs through the eyepiece of spotting scopes. The shooter can achieve the equivalent of a 6,000 mm lens, he said. To see some of Bouton's photographs, visit www.birdwatchersdigest.com/leica and follow the links.

Many people milled about the lobby area of the Windemere. "There's a good chance there've been more people sign up this year than previous years," Brodkin said.

A main reason, people have told him, is because the festival was moved from Bisbee to Sierra Vista, he said, expressing awareness that his comment might upset folks in Bisbee.

Brodkin said Bisbee's facilities were not laid out for a convention. For example, the festival wasn't able to have speaking events in the same location as the vendor and information booths. In Bisbee the festival organizers had to hold talks in the Presbyterian church's annex.

"Here, everything's in the same place. Everything is done right here," Brodkin said, noting that the Windemere even prepared sandwiches and other food for the birders to take out to the many field trips planned this week.

The festival is not just about birds. It's also about mammals. For example, Southeast Arizona has jaguars. "We've seen one," said Brodkin, noting that he and his wife, Priscilla, saw a jaguar in August 2004 while they were waiting to go through the Border Patrol checkpoint north of Whetstone as they were en route to the Tucson International Airport to catch a plane to Ecuador for a birding adventure. Priscilla first spied the creature, then Hank saw it. The trained naturalists quickly studied the "pale dirty yellow" coat, and observed the black rosette patterns and sturdy large head and shoulders. They consulted the (Kenn) "Kaufman Field Guide to Mammals of North America" and became convinced of what they saw, although it was never verified by wildlife officials. However, other sightings have been.

At 9 a.m. today, there will be a free program, "The Jaguar in Southeastern Arizona," presented by Sergio Avila in the Windemere Conference Center.

As Hank Brodkin shared his jaguar story, it got the attention of Bob Barnes from Ridgecrest, Calif., manning a booth for the renowned Kern River Birding.

Barnes said in the 1980s he saw a jaguarundi on Interstate 19 near St. Xavier. The jaguarundi is a sort of wild cat with a long midsection.

"That's the thing about birding," he said. "It gets you into everything."